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The Persistence of Guilt

Elie Wiesel has become so well-known a crusader against hatred, violence and persecution that one can forget he has also been, from the beginning, a writer. Wiesel has said his primary vocation assumed a secondary role by accident. Contrary to what his schedule — addresses before the United Nations, dinners with presidents — might suggest, he insists he is at heart an introvert who, if the world assented, would choose private reflection over public activism.

While Wiesel is best known for his memoir “Night,” he is also a novelist. Much of his fiction, however, is essentially allegorical, a vessel for the contemplation of eternal questions. Wiesel’s latest novel, “A Mad Desire to Dance,” continues this pattern. Although austerely written and at times thought-provoking, it treads familiar ground.

The protagonist, Doriel Waldman, is a Jewish New Yorker in his early 60s who believes he has gone mad. Born in Poland just before World War II, Doriel hid with his father, sister and brother while his mother, blond and the holder of a counterfeit Aryan identity card, fought for the resistance. Unlike his siblings, who were captured and killed, Doriel survived the war, as did his parents, though they died in a car crash soon after the liberation of the concentration camps. An aunt and uncle raised Doriel in America, but he demands to be called an orphan and never allows himself to be loved. “As far as I can read people’s gazes,” Doriel explains, “they see me as mad. And I’ve always felt I was. Mad about my parents first, then about God, study, truth, beauty and impossible love.”

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Illustration by Titus Neijens

Deeply troubled (“Why,” he asks, “when I shut my eyes, do I always have the feeling of being in hostile terri­tory?”) but too lucid to be labeled insane, Doriel seeks relief from a psychotherapist, Thérèse Goldschmidt. Yet his doctor has her own difficulties in dealing with the Nazis’ legacy: both she and her husband are the children of Holocaust survivors who refuse to speak of their experiences, and neither has “uttered the word under our roof.” As Doriel meets with Dr. Goldschmidt, we learn that he suffers from intense anxiety, repressed sexual desires and, above all, unrelenting guilt: for surviving Hitler’s war, for his inability to give and receive love, for doubting God. Also, he adds, “I felt oddly guilty for not feeling guilty enough.”

Despite its thematic possibilities, Wie­sel’s narrative turns out to be uncomfortably simplistic. Doriel may be a difficult patient, and in the course of treating him Dr. Goldschmidt may question her professional abilities, but enlightenment for both is just a few heart-rending sessions away. These stilted therapy scenes read as if Wiesel wrote them with a textbook at his side. (“Transference,” we are told at one point, “is a common occurrence in analysis: the patient becomes enamored of the analyst.”)

Wiesel has long been concerned with fundamental questions of good and evil, and Doriel sprinkles his discussions of the past with references to the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and Hasidic teachings, as well as observations on Zionism and Eastern asceticism. This gives the writing an aphoristic quality. In one of his therapy sessions, for example, Doriel recalls a man he met on a trip to Jerusalem who asked, “Do you know why God demands that each of us love Him?” and then quickly answered his own question: “He doesn’t need our love, but we need it.” Elsewhere Doriel tells Dr. Goldschmidt that “The Book of Job taught me that the sadness of one group of people doesn’t alleviate the sadness of others. On the contrary: it adds to it.”

Such facile insights add little to Elie Wie­sel’s legacy. But perhaps they’re beside the point. In “One Generation After,” a collection of essays and stories published in 1970, Wiesel declared that he attaches “more importance to questions than to answers. For only the questions can be shared.” When there are no answers, the writing must go on.

A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE

By Elie Wiesel

Translated by Catherine Temerson

274 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25

Correction: March 15, 2009

Because of an editing error, a review on March 1 about “A Mad Desire to Dance,” by Elie Wiesel, omitted the name of the translator. She is Catherine Temerson.

Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Persistence of Guilt. Today's Paper|Subscribe